Sunday, May 17, 2009

Another week slips by

Wednesday lunchtime found me sitting outside the deputy head’s office with Olivier. He had had a dispute with his English teacher and called his lessons a load of ‘merde’. The result was a lecture about how he has never really put any effort into lycée and two days suspension from lessons; I’ve made a list of things for him to do over the two days, mainly revision, the Baccalaureate is in a month.

On Wednesday afternoon Manpower telephoned with some hours of exam supervising starting on Thursday.

Thursday morning I went to the loo with George Cluny before I started work. He’s on the toilet door urging us ‘girls’ to save water (put a brick in the cistern) and the planet. I hung my coat up over him. I mean, George Cluny, I want him to have a good impression of me….. I wonder who the boys have got in their loos?

I had a nice exam. There were supposed to be 8 international students but the Russians had gone home and someone else was taking the exam in their own country so I had two very polite young men from India; One of them was recovering from chicken pox. Friday was good too. Everyone finished well before time and I had a good chat with the lady I was working with. You remember I had a few problems with someone before Christmas? The class representatives had noticed her rudeness too and she was asked not to come back.

The washing machine went funny again this morning. I had to unplug it to stop it from making a blowing noise. I tried it again after a few minutes and it was fine. I must phone up and see if the company has been reinstated. I discovered that in France nowadays a company that’s due to go under is given 6 months to try to sort things out. Hopefully my guarantee will come back to life.

Yesterday, Rob worked until midnight. The idea was that visitors would admire the sunset from the top of the St Nicolas tower. It was windy, cold and wet – but they were still quite busy.

3 comments:

Katie is underwhelmed by her french teacher, as it happens. I was talking about this with a friend who teaches french at another school, and she recommended some good books and gavve me a copy of "The Complete Merde!" by Genevieve Edis. Gosh, that was educational! Hope the revision is useful

Dru: You would not believe the numbers of young people we have taught at home because they got off to a bad start learning English at school. You can do an awful lot, just by keepng her interested in language and the culture.

Mary Lou : I do know the answer to this one ! In the old days the servants used to tip the contents of the chamber posts out through the bedroom windows in the mornings. To warn the passers by they shouted ‘Gardy loo!’. They were trying to be posh I suppose, because it’s distorted French ‘Gardez-vous!’, which means Watch out!. I imagine that the ‘loo’ part stuck because it was easy to remember. Why do you call it ‘the John’?

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About Me

I'm interested in a lot of things. In recent years I've been selling old French postcards and love researching the history behind them. Sometimes I'm inspired to write a short story about my postcards.

Life begins at 40 but it really gets going in the 50s, then on with the sweet 60s!